Creating single node VSAN cluster

If you want to play with VMware VSAN and you don’t have three hosts (VSAN requirement) to play on or your lab doesn’t have enough resources to run nested infrastructure of three ESXi hosts you’ve got one more solution – run “cluster” of one ESXi host and force VSAN provisioning. In this post I will show you how to do it quickly and efficiently using virtual machine with ESXi 6.0 inside.

Create virtual machine and set it’s resources.

You have to set virtual memory to at least 6 GB of RAM, this is neccessary for VSAN provisioning to complete!

After adding disks the new datastore called vsanDatastore should show up. You can check it using vSphere C# Client or ESXi Embedded Host Client:

At this stage datastore based on VSAN is ready to work and we can deploy virtual machines on that datastore. One more thing we need to do is to connect ESXi to vCenter and assign VSAN license. Without that VSAN is going to work in trial mode for only 60 days.